This article examines the role of sound in digital media as a technologically shaped cultural process of materializing sounds. This process is analyzed in three steps: first, the role of functional sounds is explored using the examples of ring tones, of scientific sonification, and
of ubiquitous music; in a second step, the ways in which domesticated voices are used between car navigation, vocaloids, and the technically modeled voice of a moderator; in a final step, the contemporary dispositives of music are examined, which actively exploit a sonic capital. The role
of sound in digital media becomes thus discernible in its orientation toward the goal of a pervasive apparatus-listening that reorders and rearranges the manifold aspects and usages of sound in everyday life.

SPIEL. Neue Folge is an international academic journal dedicated to a wide range of topics and research questions in the discipline of Culture and Media Studies. In particular, SPIEL. Neue Folge aims to publish research that addresses theoretical and methodological questions and that helps to broaden, advance and improve existing research approaches to the discipline.